Mat Newman August 11 2015 18:43:45

Every year in late January, for over 20 years, something amazing has happened in Orlando, Florida, USA. It's been the annual gathering of the Lotusphere, Connect, ConnectEd community coming together from all over the world to share their ideas, experiences, expertise and best practices. And yes, a whole lotta FUN!

Are you ahead of your peers in reimagining how you work? Are you responding rapidly to customer needs in creative, meaningful ways? Are you spending less time behind the scenes and more time out front, leading your future? We want to hear about it. Now is your chance to be a speaker at Connect 2016, the premier global conference for social business and the digital experience. Attendees will gain practical advice and strategic insights based on proven best practices. We invite you to submit your proposal in one or more of the following topics:

Digital Experience

Email

Meetings and Chat

Social Collaboration

Social Content

You may have noticed the lack of "Tracks" at present. The content team is working hard to ensure that the sessions will be targeted, and grouped together according to the interests of the attendees. More to come soon!

In the meantime, there is a clear timeline this year and an earlier call for abstracts, which means that the agenda that so many find important in justifying their attendance will be available earlier than in previous years. Timeline for submissions

Call for Speakers Closes: September 4, 2015

Speakers Notified: Mid-October 2015

Presentations Due: December 21, 2015

So go ahead, jump in, submit that idea, HERE and I'll see you in Orlando (albeit at a new venue) in just a few months time :-)

Isn't the abstract deadline a little short especially with no declaration of what tracks are going to be there? The current "Areas" are rather vague right now and sound more marketing focused then technical focused. To me at least....

I hope someone speaks about usability in Lotus Notes. I've been using version 8.5 on Windows 7 Pro at work. Some things that I notice that really affect the user experience:

1) Mouse scrolling is not location sensitive. In Notes, the last pane that had focus will be the receiver for mouse scroll events regardless of where the cursor is. For example, you can mouse scroll over an email preview and have the email list scroll instead. To make the email preview respond, you have to click it first. And vice versa, to make the email list respond, you need to click it first.

So here's a typical sequence, exclamation marks indicate where the user was encountering unexpected behavior:

- mouse scroll over an email preview

- email list scrolls instead!

- click the email, mouse scroll over it

- now you've lost the place in the email list!

- mouse scroll over the email list

- email preview scrolls instead!

- click the email list, mouse scroll over it

- now you've lost the place in the email preview!

- etc.

In every other Windows application, the window underneath the cursor responds to the mouse scroll events, regardless of whether it has focus. If this can be fixed, it would improve usability by so much!

2) We get meeting requests from Outlook users. Sometimes they delete them or reschedule them, or otherwise mess them up. Every time you open an item in preview connected to these messed up meetings, Lotus Notes opens a popup: "The repeating instance document corresponding to this notice cannot be located." which interrupts the workflow. So it's like a minefield iterating through the email list using the cursor up/down keys. The only reason for a popup to interrupt the workflow is if the user will be doing something that might be destructive. Previewing a message shouldn't qualify.

3) Email preview headers take up a lot of space and they don't scroll with the document. You get this tiny little window to read the message body. There are ways to workaround, but really this is just plain targeting the 95% who don't need the header taking up all the room, and don't want to be doing extra clicks to open emails or compress headers or whatever. Note that the entire meeting requests including headers do scroll, so the behavior is inconsistent!

4) Sometime when you hover over an email address in previews, it opens a small window displaying details. But you can't do anything with it! For example, my expectation is that I can select and copy an e-mail address, or add it to contacts or something, but sometimes you can't do anything with it. The behavior isn't consistent: sometimes you get a small window, other times an underline, other times no indication.

5) No way to easily "Reply" or "Reply All" from Sent items. Yes, this is useful, for example, if you forgot something important and need to include it. And it shouldn't reply back to you, but duplicate the To: and CC: in the sent item. Right now you need to open the email, select reply, delete your own address and move people from CC: to To:. Again, target the 95%.

These are the big ones I notice. I apologize if these can be corrected by simple changes in settings. But Preferences, Help and Search are another set of issues...